Monday, 20 August 2007

... Not surprisingly, MSOs and cable programmers continue to cry foul over
broadcast digital must-carry and the possibility of multicast carriage.
They well should. (See Cable's All-Upset Over All-Digital.) ¶ But what the cable industry has failed to articulate is an alternative
plan for the use of the spectrum that would be wasted under digital
must-carry requirements. ¶ Here's a suggestion. If the FCC deep-sixes digital must-carry,
MSOs pledge to use the spectrum to rollout 100-Mbit/s Internet access
nationwide. Move the argument into the marketplace, and empower
consumers to pressure politicians still under the spell of broadcast
lobbyists. ...

Link: Cable Digital News. I'm not advocating a position here, but we broadcasters might think about whether having a 100 mbps pipe to consumers might be better for our business model in the long run than trying to monetize more linear channels on already over-stuffed cable systems. --Dennis

Viewers of online video have never warmed to having to watch a preroll
ads, and so, sites and marketers have been desperately searching for
marketing vehicles that will click with consumers. A WSJ piece surveys
some possibles answers. One format being pursued is the use of graphics
that slide over the bottom of the video-viewing screen - sometimes
called referred to as overlays, bugs or tickers - as the best way to
monetize online video. Another method advertisers have been trying out
is wrapping the video players in skins. And still others haven’t given
up on prerolls, attempting to make them more palatable by shortening
the ads to five seconds or inserting a countdown timer telling viewers
when the actual content will begin. ...

Andrew Keen's book, The Cult of the Amateur, has attracted a lot of incoming missiles. Last month, I linked to critiques by Clay Shirky and David Weinberger. Michael "Mr. Attention" Goldhaber has just published Part I of a response to the book on his weblog he's titled, The Cult of the Professional. I'll link to Part II when he posts it. Link: Michael H. Goldhaber.

The BBC's current iPlayer beta has attracted a lot of comment in the blogosophere -- mostly about DRM and the Windows XP limits of the beta version -- but real story here is that ISPs in the UK have chosen this announcement as an occasion to make political points about capacity issues. These complaints have the strong potential to be heard elsewhere in the world also as more and and bigger video files transit the Web, especially via P2P networks, legal and otherwise. Here is a summary of stories about this development.

Then, to put this into some perspective, also read Om Malik's Online Video To Boost Internet Protocol (IP) Traffic. He writes:

It should come as no surprise: the big and fat video files are one of the main reason why the bandwidth glut created by overbuilding in the telecom boom of 1990s is evaporating. The good news is that the demand for bandwidth is not going to end any time soon. ¶ A report released by Cisco Systems (CSCO) predicts that consumer-related traffic running over IP networks is going to grow at a compound annual rate of 58 percent from 2006 to 2011, and will end up totaling 17 exabytes per month by 2011. ...

With the MyFox
deal, the Fox-affiliated television stations have just taken the path of
least resistance in the area where they need to make the biggest strides. They
have chosen ease over risk. ...

... We have seen stations fail in their online attempts. What do those failures
have in common?

A lack of an independent platform

A failure to invest in a station’s own infrastructure

The ability to be creative and reflect the needs and desires of their own
communities

No entrepreneurial spirit

Complete control over management

No buy-in from the upper ranks

Revenue sharing

In short: ownership.

The stations that have failed to make money from their online efforts are
those that have failed to take ownership - true ownership - over their sites. By
handing over the command and control to vendors, stations get into this loop
where A. They produce an inferior product, B. They make no money and so C. They
don’t invest in the product. ...

Link: Lost Remote. This longish essay goes on to make a number of interesting points.

In an email heads up about this post, KAKM's John Proffitt adds the following comments:

This logic follows with how I look at pubcasting station web sites as well.
When control and leadership of online work is ceded to an outside entity -- even
one that's a partner/friend/helper -- the local station staff treat online
activities as a forgotten backwater and ignore engaging the public in meaningful
"new media" ways. ...

... Since the web allows for one-to-one and
many-to-many connections, using a third party platform strikes me as
antithetical to the nature of the web. To my way of thinking, stations across
the country that want to remain relevant and engaged going into the future
should do two things:

1. Drop the word "station" from your vocabulary --
that word has declining value and meaning

2. Do all your online work and
social networking yourself -- never turn that over to a hired gun ...

The best "freebie" white paper I found last year relating to my electronic media responsibilities was IBM's The end of TV as we know it: A future industry perspective, to which I linked in January 2006. It holds up well today. So when David Leroy (thanks) pointed me at a pair of related new ones from the IBM Institute for Business Value and with two of t he same authors, I was hopeful.

The authors (Saul J. Berman, Steven Abraham, Bill Battino, Louisa Shipnuck and Andreas Neus -- Berman and Shipnuck being two of the authors on The end of TV...) didn't disappoint. Navigating the Media Divide: Innovating and Enabling New Business Models and The fight ahead on media's main streets are, as the titles imply, about more than television -- but then last year's report was relevant beyond television also.The papers explore issues around the familiar scenario framework that creates four quadrants with the X-axis being "Distribution and device platforms" ranging from "proprietary" to "open" and the Y-axis being "Content blend" ranging from "Produced by professionals" to "User/community contribution." They view the upper and rightmost dimensions as being particularly disruptive amd posit that these four quadrants will be the four business models in use over the next 3-4 years. The figure here (click for larger image) depicts these business models.

The authors provide ten specific recommendations for media companies some of which seem pretty obvious (e.g., "Put consumers at the center of your business and boardroom"), while others more insightful (e.g., "Give control to get share").

Saturday, 18 August 2007

Michael Rosenblum says that this chart "contains the inevitable seeds of the future. "
Click to enlarge image.

He writes:

... Suddenly we move from 3 networks to 500 cable channels. The
limitation on number of channels is now no longer the EM spectrum, but
rather the capabilities of coaxial cable to carry signal. And as a
result, there are a lot more channels. And a lot more channels means a
demand for a lot more content. ¶ In fact, we go from a gross demand for content of 64,000 hours in 1974, to nearly 4.5 million hours in 2003. ¶ However, at the same time as the number of channels is expanding,
the size of the audience remains the same. Now there are many more
channels dividing a pie that is essentially the same size as it was in
1973. ...

Public television station KETC in St. Louis, now under the leadership of the always-progressive Jack Galmiche, has been using consultant Rob Paterson to help it find better connections with its community. Rob has an interesting overview of what they're doing on his weblog. Link: Robert Paterson's Weblog. --Dennis

Terry Heaton has a very good interview with journalist Rafat Ali, founder of paidContent.org, mocoNews.net and a third news site dealing with digital content in India. I've been reading paidContent and mocoNews since they began. No one does a better job of following the money relating to mobile and digital content. Link: Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog. --Dennis